The 67-year-old cartoonist R. Crumb, as he draws himself, has eyes that try to penetrate everything—be it the mind of a cat named Fritz, the soul
of a mystic guru, or, in many cases, a woman's dress. For this, the cartoonist has been called both "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th
century," and "sick and deranged."

In a July interview with
the Sydney Morning Herald, Crumb described himself as "a very eccentric, oddball character, weird pervert."

This self-assessment was not well received by one of Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, which ran an article the next
day under the headline "Smutty Show a Comic Outrage."
Anticipating Crumb's arrival for the Graphic festival at the Sydney Opera House, where he was scheduled to be a headliner, the paper reported that he "is renowned for extreme drug-fuelled
drawings, depicting incest, rape, paedophilia and bestiality."

Crumb promptly backed out of the festival. He explained why he canceled his trip in The Age:

I was quite alarmed when I read the article in the Sunday Telegraph. I showed it to my wife, Aline, who said, "That's it, you're not going." She
got a very bad feeling from the article. She feared I might be attacked physically by some angry, outraged person who simply saw red at the mention of
child molesters. She remarked she'd never seen any article about me as nasty as this one. ... Aline and I went round and round about this thing: should I
go or not? Ultimately, she could not shake her feeling of ominous dread. I knew that if I went, that she would be in a state of anxiety the whole time
I was gone.

This was not the first time Crumb has faced harsh criticism for his work, his eccentricity, or his tendency toward the perverse. (Or perhaps he simply
holds a different understanding of perversity, considering he once turned down a handsome job offer from Playboy because the magazine was too
commercial.) In 1972, his two-page strip, "The Many Faces of R. Crumb," presented the various caricatures his critics had drawn for him: deriving
sexual satisfaction from his own cartoons—"hard at work in [his] studio," Crumb wryly wrote—as well as a slob, a cultural spokesperson, and so forth.
In the past, it seems he has effectively managed his public image as it tends to be conflated with his artwork. Now, though, Crumb appears genuinely
distressed.

"He wants to control the context or the reception of his work. Which is basically, ultimately impossible," says Elizabeth Mansfield, an associate
professor of Art History at New York University.

Artists have tried to hold the reins on their public identities for generations, but "finding an exact parallel is hard," says Mansfield. She couldn't
think of any cases in which an artist pulled out of an upcoming exhibition after being pre-emptively eviscerated by the press. More often, a gallery
will remove pieces that it deems inappropriate or governments will ban unfavorable works. In Australia, in fact, Crumb's cartoons cannot be shown
without state approval.

Gustav Courbet, leader of the French Realist movement during the 19th century, might serve as an unlikely mirror to Crumb. Like the
cartoonist, Courbet's personality was heavily mapped onto his art. He was viewed as a "rough country bumpkin," Mansfield explained: "Beer-drinking, a
loutish fellow, uncouth." His art reflected that ruggedness, projecting Courbet as "a person who is responding instinctively to his bodily desires, who
is applying paint in this almost aggressive, untutored way with his pallet knife rather than a brush."

Courbet embraced this uncivilized persona, played along with his critics, and even cultivated outrage. Anything that causes a stir, after all, brings
publicity. In 1855, when the Salon—the official art exhibition in France—accepted several of his paintings except one, "The Artist's Studio," Courbet
put up an oppositional show called "The Pavilion of Realism." He repeated the gesture in 1867, when he showed about 140 works in a personal exhibition
on the Place de l'Alma. In doing so, Mansfield says, "He created a rejection of his work that didn't really exist."

But Courbet also felt the sting of criticism. When the Salon refused to show his painting, "Venus and Psyche," on account of its "indecency," Courbet
was left in the dark, frustrated and anxious. In 1864 he wrote in a letter, "It is impossible for me to continue to exhibit. It is a tricky business.
These people want revenge at all cost... With all these troubles, I have internal hemorrhoids that are killing me. I am literally unable to work. I am
into leeches, into baths, armed with a syringe, and I am up all night."

Edouard Manet felt similarly despondent after his painting, "Olympia," was shown at the French Salon in 1865. Reviewers said it "recalls the horror of
the morgue," and that "the color of the flesh is dirty, the modeling non-existent." Others wrote, "I do not know whether the dictionary of French
aesthetics holds expressions to characterize her...her face [is] stupid, her skin cadaverous," and the artist is "a brute who paints green women with
dish brushes." Young or pregnant women were warned that they should "flee this spectacle."

But a couple years later, Manet put on his own anti-Salon show. The catalogue stated: "The first stage in an artist's career is a battle, which at
least should be fought on equal terms, that is to say that the artist should be able to show the public what he has done." Otherwise, "he would be
forced to make a pile of his canvases or roll them up in the attic... Monsieur Manet has never wished to protest. On the contrary, the protest, entirely
unexpected on his part, has been directed against himself...By exhibiting, an artist finds friends and allies."

When defying critics in the showroom won't suffice, other artists have gone to court. American artist James Whistler sued John Ruskin, who reviewed his
1875 work "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket," by condemning the painting, the artist, and the gallery. "The Grosvenor Gallery ought not
to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture," Ruskin
wrote in the November 1878 Fors Clavigera newsletter. Whistler won his case, although wound up losing money on legal fees after he was awarded
only a farthing.

Crumb's debacle is not a copy of what has come before, though he might draw from the past as a guide going forward. Cartoonist Pat Grant sounded pessimistic in a letter in to the Sunday Telegraph: "When will you News Ltd. scumsuckers learn that your dodgy, lazy, sensationalist journalism ruins people's lives?" But Crumb might not be worse for the wear as he remains safe at his home in the south of France, where he can look to the careers of his countrymen who used fiery words to fuel their artistic success.

About the Author

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.